


Where Strides the Colossus

by elwing_alcyone



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Act Six, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humour, Missing Scene, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-24
Updated: 2012-04-24
Packaged: 2017-11-04 06:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/390901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/elwing_alcyone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How a boy and a genetically-engineered pawn became friends and founded a city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Strides the Colossus

**Author's Note:**

> With apologies to Mastodon for what I have chosen to do to their song-title _Where Strides the Behemoth_.

Dave had been expecting a good variety of people to hang out with on the meteor. Okay, most of them were belligerent alien assholes who had introduced themselves by waging a prolonged internet trolling campaign – prolonged from Dave's point of view if not theirs – but still, variety. Wordy, wordy variety. If he got too weirded out by the horse dude, there was cat-girl who liked role-playing unironically, and the other Hero of Time; she was supposed to be a total blast according to Terezi, although Dave thought he had detected a hint of sarcasm there. And there was the incredibly shitty rapper, and the hacker who had never talked to any of them, and the overexcited one who made the fish puns, and if Dave got really desperate, there was the wwavvery one who had several times claimed personal responsibility for the obliteration of the human race. Hell, he could even give spider-troll a chance.

But all of them were gone. Which limited the options for socialising somewhat.

There was Karkat, but he was a loud, angry douchebag who liked to pretend he didn't still think he was in charge. Gamzee was nowhere to be found. Kanaya was pretty cool, except she didn't appreciate Dave's taste in music or really his taste in anything, not to mention that there was only so much verbose disdain he could put up with, and Rose had a prior claim on that quota.

That left Terezi. He would have spent the majority of his time with her anyway, to be honest. Terezi was, as far as he could tell, the only troll with a sense of humour. She was also the only one with an appreciation for fine art, which, well, let's just say if he'd taken that piece of irony to Bro, it would have earned him a fist bump.

And then there was the Mayor.

Dave didn't really get the Mayor. No one did. No one even knew if he had a name other than 'the Mayor'. Dave had tried asking him and giving him paper to write out an answer, but the Mayor had just shrugged. He liked being called the Mayor. That was cool with him. Apparently.

Carapacians could read, write and understand English, so the language barrier wasn't so much a barrier as a knee-high fence, but the fact that they couldn't speak the language made normal-speed dialogue pretty one-sided. Not that Dave wasn't capable of holding up his end of a conversation and then some, but...

"What do you even talk about with a dude who's a chess piece?" He passed the drawing tablet back to Terezi for her additions. They had this whole collaborative partnership going on. It was awesome.

"I tried to tell him about courtblock dramas," she said, leaning close to examine a panel that Dave had deliberately coloured bright red just for her. She was totally thinking about licking it, but out of courtesy refrained. "He got very agitated when I explained about His Honourable Tyranny."

"Okay, no, but see, any sensible person would get agitated when you mention that the justice system on your fucked-up-to-hell planet used to get all their oversight from a giant monster with black blood and six horns who got to eat the condemned. Because that is some freaky shit, you know?"

"Disrespect to His Honourable Tyranny is punishable by obligatory forfeiture of control over the next series of panels."

"That was not in the rules I agreed to."

"Ignorance of the law – "

"Oh Jesus, don't start. Fine, you can do the next panels. I'm going for coffee. You believe I'm actually starting to like that swill? Who would've thought. Do you have Stockholm syndrome on your planet? I mean, do you know what that is?"

She didn't. Dave thought society-wide Stockholm syndrome was the only possible explanation for most of troll culture, but maybe that was why they didn't have a name for the concept.

It had only been a couple of weeks on the meteor; there hadn't really been time for Dave to figure out where everything was. It was inevitable he'd take a wrong transportalizer at some point, and he guessed better now than at a time when he had something important to do. Terezi had the comic under control. She could manage without him.

Now what in the hell was going on over here?

The Mayor had set up in one of the empty labs – not one of the ones that'd once had dead bodies, thank god. He had alchemized a whole bunch of cans, and was arranging them on a rough grid that he'd marked out on the floor in what looked suspiciously like juggalo greasepaint. When he saw Dave, he lifted one hand in a cheerful enough greeting, and went back to his work.

"What up, Mr Mayor. Looking good with the, uh, construction project, I guess. Seriously, what is this?"

The Mayor clicked somewhere in his throat and made a gesture. Intuiting the meaning of interpretive dance was Rose's thing, and Dave wasn't very good at it, but he thought he could figure that one out. _What does it look like?_

"Okay, so it's like, a Lego city, only with cans. Oh, dude, I get it. It's your town, the one you're Mayor of, right? Can Town or something."

The chittering noise the Mayor made in response to that sounded positive. Encouraged by this, Dave went over for a closer look.

"Right, I see you've got a Town Hall going on right there, with the bit of amber on the top. Where did you even find that anyway? You weren't ever on LOHAC, were you? And the cans are... I can't tell if they're the people or the buildings. Shit, where's the manager? Never mind, you didn't read that one, probably. But it looks good, man. Civilised and shit. Kinda drab, though. I mean, it's all grey and white. Hey, here's a plan, why don't you borrow some of Terezi's chalk and we can get some scenery going on up in here, you know, trees and weed plantations and basketball courts, that's all stuff you need for a proper urban development."

At the mention of chalk, the Mayor blinked his eyes very rapidly and stuck out his hands in obvious enthusiasm. Dave was getting good at this. He checked his sylladex for chalk, and... yep, Santa was in the house.

"Mr Mayor, do you accept bribes? You can call it a campaign contribution. Dude, patience, no need to grab. Oh, no. Oh, no, you're not actually going to – okay, you are going to lick the green chalk. How are you not BFFs with Terezi by now? Hey, let me borrow the yellow a minute, I have an idea. You don't mind if I do something on this wall, right? Just for a backdrop. Don't look at me like that, it's going to be the best fucking thing you ever laid eyes on, trust me. Artistic vision at work here."

Watched closely by the Mayor, he drew a yellow figure launching himself into the air, and filled in the background with enough sky to exhaust an entire stick of blue chalk. He annotated the 'cloun', because who was to say a mural couldn't also be a comic? He enquired as to whether the Mayor possessed a ruler to measure exactly how high the man in yellow had to be, but the Mayor did not appear to have a ruler, or even a sylladex to keep one in.

"See, this is a good backdrop for civic activities," Dave explained, stepping back to appraise his work. "It's like the Colossus of Rhodes, except for the mandatory naval upskirting." He remembered that the Mayor probably wasn't that strong on his Earth history. "Just to fill you in, the Colossus of Rhodes was this giant statue built by ancient gay dudes and ships had to sail under the loincloth and behold his bulge before they were allowed to trade or whatever. My Bro used to talk about getting a full-size replica up on the roof of our apartment building. Trust me, this guy's a big improvement. Hey, how about I put some horns on him as a gesture of interspecies goodwill? Karkat can interpret it as a grievous insult. Everyone wins."

By the time he was done he felt like it was getting pretty late, and Terezi probably thought he'd got himself lost again. Which, technically, he had.

"Sorry to kinda hijack your project there, dude," he said, brushing the chalk dust from his hands. "I'll bring you more blue as soon as I can find my way to the Alchemiter lab."

The Mayor, who had been occupied marking the stairs with "Danger: Falling Rocks" signs, got up to inspect the wall. Little dude had a critical eye. Dave almost felt nervous.

Then the Mayor turned and solemnly pressed the green chalk into his hand.

"This for me to keep?"

The Mayor nodded.

"Oh man, that is touching, but I can't take your favourite colour. If you're saying you'd like me to do another wall with more green in it, though..."

The Mayor clasped his hand in fervent glee.

"Teamwork. Awesome. Hey, can I bring Terezi down here sometime? I bet she'd think this whole thing is pretty dope."

The Mayor seemed amenable to that suggestion, and the firefly even lighted on Dave's sleeve for a moment as if to register her approval. Maybe, Dave thought as he made his way back to Terezi's room, they could collaborate on this, too. Add some trees and people, maybe even get a narrative going. In retrospect it would be a perfect kind of nonsense to have Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff living in a city entirely constructed of cans and ruled over by a benevolent chess piece, at least insofar as Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff had any kind of consistent setting at all. And it couldn't hurt, having someone new to hang out with.


End file.
